Do You Take This ...

by Dan Jacoby

After three years, you'd think that the President and his people understand the idea that there are consequences. Isaac Newton understood it when he wrote that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The President cut taxes for rich people, and the result is fewer rich people. The President decided to rid Iraq of someone he deemed a major terrorist, and the result is more terrorism in Iraq.

Now, with the growing trend toward loosening the bonds around the bonds of matrimony, President Bush has decided to call for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. He just doesn't get it. Never mind that the amendment process is one in which the President has absolutely no voice and no right to get involved. Never mind that the same arguments were used in past generations to outlaw interracial marriage. Instead, let's concentrate on the immediate consequences of his speech.

First of all, the candidate who promised to bring people together has once again driven a wedge between people. In this case, he is not only driving a wedge between those who support equal rights and those who don't, but also driving a wedge between people who love each other, care for and about each other, and just want to declare that fact to the world.

We live in a society and in a time where denial of rights based on sex, race, national origin, religion -- nearly every category we can think of -- has been removed from our laws, if not our hearts. Now, the right wing, led by President Bush, wants to add discrimination to the supreme law of the land.

This is further proof of the hypocrisy that permeates Republican philosophy. They claim to want to get government off our backs, but their every action belies their pious words. The Republican desire to shove their way into every aspect of our lives has once again come to the forefront. Whether it's their defense of the ill-named "Patriot Act", the declaration of American citizens as "enemy combatants" in order to throw us into dungeons, or this new offensive, everything the Republicans do seems geared toward stripping American citizens of our freedom.

But even more incomprehensible is the fact that President Bush's advisors have once again failed -- or perhaps their boss has simply, or simplemindedly, refused -- to consider the consequences of his actions. For in calling for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages, the President is effectively saying that without such an amendment, such marriages are perfectly legal.

Does President Bush really want to put the federal stamp of approval on same-sex marriages? Does he even want people to consider that possibility? Did it even occur to him that this would be the obvious result? Or does the President simply lack the intellectual capacity to understand what he is doing?

Thanks to the President's speech, an argument can now be made that same-sex marriage is legal. Let us suggest a radical rationale for his call for a constitutional amendment. Perhaps President Bush is a closet liberal after all, and rather than coming out of the closet, he secretly works to undermine everything he claims to stand for.

Could he really be that shrewd?

 

Copyright 2004, Dan Jacoby

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